Scenes From Early Life (14 page)

‘I asked for something to be done about it,’ Nana said. ‘I distinctly asked for something to be done.’

Nani asked, and it became clear that my grandfather was talking about the tap in the upstairs bathroom. It had started dripping the day before. My grandfather could not endure the sound of a dripping tap in the house, and in the end, he said, he had got up in the middle of the night and placed a towel in the hand-basin to mute the sound. As was his way, he must have said, as he left the house in the morning, ‘Somebody ought to do something about that dripping tap.’ What had happened was that the towel had been removed from the basin, and nothing else had been attempted. My grandfather gave my father, as the only other man in the house, a long, assessing, unfair look, as if he had been there to overhear the suggestion in the morning, and should have done something about the dripping tap. My father looked back.

Once they were seated at table, and my father’s first brutish hunger had been satisfied – my mother’s sisters used to watch him, stifling giggles, as he laid into the mutton curry – he sat back in his chair and began a conversation.

‘It is interesting, this new film,’ he said.

‘What film are you talking about, Mahmood?’ my mother said. He was not a great cinema-goer. Normally he barely listened when my mother’s sisters talked about a film they had seen, or some other entertainment.

‘There is a film in the cinemas that was shot near Dacca, on the delta,’ he said, in a measured way. He stretched his neck, rotated his shoulders, took another mouthful of curry.

It was like my father to assume that nobody else could have known about this film. It had been discussed during its filming by the intelligentsia. A film-maker had gone into the delta and shot the ordinary people at their tasks of fishing and working. It had been said in advance that this would herald a new age of film-making in the region. But
Jago Hua Savera
had come out and nobody had gone to see it at all. Apart from my grandfather, who referred to the cinema scornfully as ‘the flicks’, everyone in the family was a keen film-goer. But in this case, Era and Mira had gone to see it and returned with big yawns, saying that they had never suffered so much in their lives as at the hands of
Jago Hua Savera
and its fisherfolk.

‘Yes,’ my father said. ‘It is an interesting film.’

‘Did you stay to the end, Mahmood?’ Era said.

‘Yes,’ my father said. ‘I stayed to the end.’ My mother took a large spoonful of rice, poised it above his plate, gave it a good shake, and then offered him a bowl of dal. ‘It is only playing in one cinema, I believe.’

‘Which cinema is that, Mahmood?’ my grandfather said.

‘The Shabistan,’ my father said. ‘It is a very old cinema.’

‘I never saw a film as wonderful as
Pyaasa
,’ my grandmother said. ‘Did you see
Pyaasa
, Mahmood?’

‘Oh, yes,
Pyaasa
, that was a film,’ Era said. She started singing at the dinner table, a thing my grandfather utterly detested. ‘And so sad! One could have cried.’

My grandmother and aunts started comparing their favourite scenes in
Pyaasa
, a film that had taken Dacca by storm two years ago, and was still being talked about. Probably there were cinemas, even then, which were still playing it to faithful audiences. When they had finished, my father said, ‘That sounds quite different from
Jago Hua Savera
. I liked it, but Laddu found it dull, just as you did, Era.’

‘Who found it dull, Mahmood?’ my grandfather said.

‘Laddu,’ my father said.

‘Laddu, did you say?’ my grandmother said.

My father went on to explain – he had the attention of the table now. There was no question that not all his sisters-in-law-to-be held him in the great esteem that my mother did, and my grandfather did. For some of them, he was a not very exciting country cousin who, by means of hard work and honesty, had made his way in the world, and was to be the man their eldest sister would marry. They were not rude to him, but they were not accustomed to give him their full attention at the dinner table. They had never spent a night with him in the police cells, singing songs of resistance and independence, and had always found it tricky to visualize the story when my mother told it to them, as she quite frequently did. But once or twice in his life, my father successfully dropped a bombshell, and made people listen to what he had to say. This was one of those times. The whole family listened to him, explaining that he had met not just Laddu, but Laddu’s wife Sharmin. At first by chance, in the Balda Gardens, by the Joy House, but afterwards by arrangement: the three of them had gone to see
Jago Hua Savera
only the day before.

‘You met her, Mahmood?’ Mira said. ‘What is she like?’

‘Laddu was full of plans,’ my father said. ‘He kept talking about the cinema, all through the film – he kept saying that nobody had done anything to this cinema for years except change its name. He kept saying that if he had some money, he could run the cinema, transform it into a wonderful place, that it could hardly fail. I don’t think the film really held his attention. But I enjoyed it.’

‘But what is she like?’ Mary said. ‘Is she tall or short, fat, thin, is she pretty?’

‘I wouldn’t say she was pretty,’ my father said. ‘Not pretty, exactly. But there is something quite agreeable about her face.’

There was a long pause; the whole table sat waiting for my father to continue, but he just went on eating. That seemed to be all he had observed about Laddu’s wife.

‘And is she sensible, or is she a fool?’ Nani said finally. ‘How could she marry Laddu in such a hole-and-corner way?’

‘I don’t know,’ my father said. ‘We didn’t go into all that.’

‘I suppose we could ask Laddu and his wife to come here for dinner,’ my grandfather said. ‘It seems ridiculous never to see him. And I should meet his wife, before she decides to give us grandchildren. Yes, on the whole, I think Mahmood is right. We should ask Laddu and his wife round here for dinner next week. Not next week – ask them to come as soon as they may. Tomorrow. Push the boat out.’

My father had not, in fact, suggested asking Laddu and Sharmin round for dinner at all. But my grandfather was thinking about the dripping tap in the bathroom next to his bedroom.

1.

In the autumn of 1959, my father and mother married in Dacca. Immediately after their marriage, they went to Barisal, where my father took up his government post as an assistant district commissioner.

There is a large album of photographs of their wedding; formal, well mounted, in a solid volume. Nana used to collect the albums of all his children’s weddings, a long line of them in the sitting room; nowadays, I believe my sister has them. In one of the photographs, my mother sits among her sisters. They are solemn-faced: being photographed was still a novelty in the 1950s. The photographs, now, do not seem very festive to us. People lined up and faced the camera. Still, in their lovely pale saris and their wide eyes against the dark wall, my mother and her sisters look like a floating grove of water-lilies. Nani, to one side, still looks young; interested; responsible. I never thought of her as beautiful in her old age, when I knew her, or as one of those women of whom one says, ‘How beautiful she must have been when she was young.’ But here, just short of fifty, surrounded by her daughters and one son, with one white streak in her hair, just that, she seems at the confident peak of her looks and health. The bright-eyed boy at her feet, her competent hand resting on his head, is Pultoo; the baby in her arms must be Bubbly-aunty. And my mother? Well, that is just my mother. My aunts and the rest of the family may have called her Shiri, but to me she will always be just my mother. The photographs of my father, with his father, his father-in-law, and other male relations seem by comparison tense and wary; my father has somehow been pushed unwillingly to the front of the picture, where he would rather not be. Both sets of photographs seem posed, but only my aunts give the impression that they have been looking forward to posing for the photographer.

They are very different from the photographs of my wedding, as I suppose my wedding was very different from my parents’. Among my wedding photographs, there are images of my new husband feeding me cake; of some rather drunk guests dancing in globes of disco-lighting; of serried ranks of canapés waiting for the party to begin; of many other things that did not happen at my parents’ wedding, exactly fifty years before mine, and many things, including the fact of my wedding itself, which were not thought of in 1959, in a country that did not yet exist. But my parents’ wedding was a happy day.

Somewhere in the picture of my father with his male relations there is the dark face of Boro-mama, Big-uncle. My grandfather had sent Laddu and his new wife Sharmin an invitation. It had been discovered, after my father had made an approach to them, that the two were living with Sharmin’s sister while Sharmin completed her medical degree. Nani was indignant that her eldest son had, apparently, absconded from her house, not to make his own way in life but to go to live off somebody else; not even his wife, since she was studying, but his wife’s sister, of whom nothing was known. She kept her comments to herself, and to her daughters, her women friends and neighbours; Nana, who may have thought some of the same things, said nothing whatever against Laddu’s domestic circumstances. My parents’ wedding would be the perfect opportunity for Laddu to introduce his new wife into the family circle, and to allow himself to be forgiven.

Laddu apologized, but his wife Sharmin was expecting a child, and would not be able to come. However, he was happy to come. Looking at the photograph, in which Boro-mama stands in a charcoal suit between grandfathers, I try to distinguish some awkwardness, resentment or embarrassment in his face. But he has exactly the same formal, sober, puzzled expression that every Bengali seems to have assumed whenever he was faced with a camera in the 1950s.

2.

After the wedding, my mother and father travelled to Barisal, and my father began his professional life.

The experience was harder for my mother than for my father. My father had grown up in the country. He was used to a quiet existence, and an unsophisticated one. He did not mind a small circle of acquaintances, and did not long for novelty or excitement. He had, too, while studying in Dacca, learnt about self-reliance. These were the characteristics that my mother had admired in her cousin when she agreed to marry him. She was the least extrovert of her sisters, and had never thought of herself as the product of a big city, fashionable or forward in any way. But when she found herself living in a district like Barisal, she discovered that she had, after all, the imprint of some metropolitan habits.

Barisal was a port town, sleepy and remote. Much of it was built of red brick, flushed and rather angry-looking; the largest building in the city was the post office, a palace of almost military grandeur, which in more important towns the British would have faced with marble. The estuary front was busy with rusting launches and fishing boats, coming to and fro, puffing black smoke into the air, the water made slick by their discharges of oil. The ferry port was a constant host to those families, their luggage piled up like great clusters of grapes on the quayside, who are always and will always be transporting themselves from one side of Bengal to the other, as long as Bengal exists. There was something greasy and rusting about the whole town.

In those days, you travelled by rocket launch from Dacca. The government accommodation provided for assistant district commissioners was furnished, so my mother and father travelled with only a few things to begin their married life. A case, between a suitcase and a trunk in size, took my mother’s clothing – she knew she would never be able to buy good-quality silk in a place like Barisal – with a box of jewellery buried deep inside. Another case held their books – they had packed separately, but Mahmood had left his books at Nana’s house when he moved out, so it seemed sensible to combine his small professional library with my mother’s books, a few novels and anthologies of poetry, and pack them all together. My father’s clothes and possessions filled a single brown suitcase, and on top of the pile on the back of the porter’s wagon, lumbering towards the port and the rocket launch that would take them to their new home in Barisal, was my grandparents’ wedding gift: a fine pier-glass in a gold frame, wrapped in layers of cardboard to survive the journey. Other gifts, such as the dining table and chairs, which the uncles had clubbed together to provide, had stayed in Dacca for the time being. Nobody thought that my mother and father would remain in a place like Barisal for very long.

The area was remote and rudimentary. There were, it was said, tigers still roaming the countryside, and one nearby had taken a villager only months before. My mother had only ever seen a tiger in the Calcutta zoo. Many towns in the district were cut off by road from civilization for weeks on end during the rainy season. As the roads that ran along ridges between paddy-fields could be washed away, even when the waters receded there could remain weeks more of isolation while they were rebuilt. Of course, as my father said, during the rainy season, Dacca was often cut off as well. My mother wondered what Dacca was cut off from. It seemed quite sufficient in itself. Whether it was raining or not, Barisal seemed far away and strange, connected only by the water that, for much of the year, isolated other settlements. Shiri regularly thought, during the three years she and my father spent in Barisal, of the heroines of Chekhov, longing for Moscow: he was a writer she had often read without ever quite understanding before.

My mother had expected to live more simply in Barisal than she had in her father’s house in Rankin Street. When the porters drew up in front of the ill-kept red-brick bungalow in a line of similar bungalows, however, she realized she had made a mistake in her mind. Her notion of simplicity was of a quality opposed to ornateness or, she realized, the processes of accretion, which had happened in her father’s house. Despite moves, war and forced emigration, her father’s house had comfortably acquired possessions, furniture, adornments in large numbers. But so, too, it seemed, had the furnished semi-detached bungalow. The caretaker, once found and hailed by the carter, let them in, and the pair of them carried in their three cases.

Once the cases had been deposited in the hallway, and the brownish, flickering electric light had been turned on, it was clear that no preparations had been made for a newly-wed couple. The house was filled with furniture – the rejected, colossal mahogany sideboards, caryatid-supported sofas and tallboys, polished brown and malevolent as giant horrid beetles – that had been out of fashion for forty years at least. Every piece would, on its own, have been too large for the modest rooms; three or four of the hardwood behemoths made an impassable labyrinth. The sad, unchosen selection was very different from her father’s warm, mismatched rooms. In the weeks to come, they would discover that the bungalow had been left uninhabited for a year and a half. It had slowly become the repository, among all their neighbours, of any inherited furniture, perfectly good in itself but no longer needed, especially those pieces of giant furniture, which had an aura of evil, rendered in mahogany. Mahmood had lived very simply, with no real attention to comfort or elegance, all his life. But even he seemed dismayed by the bungalow; even he could tell the difference between the warm, damp garden smell of his father-in-law’s house, with its easy comfort and soothing lights, and this low, dank place, green mould covering half the back wall and sharp carved mahogany ornamentation, deliberately barking your shins at every turn.

The next morning Shiri woke, and went in the early-morning light through her overcrowded rooms. Outside, in what she thought was her garden, a man was squatting, folded up like a fan, gazing down the muddy road as if at the dawn, waiting for something to happen.

The neighbours soon made themselves known. Like Mahmood, they all worked for the government in Islamabad, filing reports in Urdu and supplying information at their remote superiors’ requests. There was little variety. Shiri had never had much of a taste for society; her social life was led among her sisters, a few friends and the daughters of neighbours. In her family, she was a byword for her reluctance to leave home and pay a call. She had never loved the passing of compliments over the tea table and, before her marriage, had never felt concern that Mahmood might deprive her of her very ordinary social life.

But, very soon, she felt first a vague dissatisfaction and then a positive dismay at the limits of the world in which she found herself. Around her was no social variety but the families of her husband’s new colleagues. They had come to Barisal from all parts of Pakistan – not just from the Bengali-speaking side, from Dacca and the surrounding provinces, but some, too, from the Urdu-speaking part of the country, the western segment. The men had been posted here, and brought their families. Those families, living for the most part in the bungalows around, were the only society to be had. It did not seem possible to gain access to people who had been born, had grown up and remained in Barisal. And so my mother, who had never felt addicted to social variety, found herself in a world too restricted even for her.

At tea parties, among the mothers and wives of Mahmood’s colleagues, Shiri sat quietly. ‘We have had to let our girl go,’ one woman said. ‘When I counted the sacks of rice, she had been feeding her whole family on our supplies for months.’

‘They are so dishonest,’ another woman, a Pakistani, said, ‘these people. One took an entire bag of chillies – he thought I would not notice. It is really extraordinary.’

Shiri thought she would contribute. ‘At home,’ she said, ‘my friend is great friends with Sheikh Mujib’s daughter, Hasina, and she tells a story about a tremendous fuss Hasina made once about the very same thing. She was expecting fifteen sacks of chilli from their estate, and what arrived were only thirteen. She made such a fuss – as if she did not have other things to interest herself in than two missing sacks of chilli.’

But there was a shuffling, an inspection, and a moving on. What was it? Did they not know who Sheikh Mujib was? Did they think there was nothing so very funny in a complaint about servants’ honesty? Shiri looked about her, at the young mothers and wives, three of them pregnant; she heard herself beginning to tell the story again, but this time as a story of motherhood, disloyal servants, and the difficulties of living in Barisal. She had not married Mahmood for this.

My father had got to know his colleagues first and, when he returned home at night, he was able to tell her the names and habits of those colleagues. It was like an interesting story to his new wife. And as the weeks passed, she found herself meeting the families of the people that Mahmood had talked about and, in the end, meeting them at home, or in their homes. But now she had got there, everything seemed so hierarchical, and she had to learn who could invite whom first. But in time she got the hang of it, just as the walls were scrubbed and repainted, and most of the furniture cleared out. She and my father made a go of it. It would not be for ever. Four months after they had moved to Barisal, my mother was pregnant. It would be with my elder brother, Zahid.